


Night Flying

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: (Ward/May if you squint), Angst, F/M, Fluff, Insomnia, Kissing, Skye and her Huge Crush on Coulson, Skye's POV, Unresolved Sexual Tension, team!fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-22
Updated: 2014-02-22
Packaged: 2018-01-13 09:32:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1221304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They don't ask why the other can't sleep - it's just nice to have company.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Night Flying

 

**1**

Skye has never had conventional sleeping habits.

At least not since her early teens when she discovered internet. There was a computer room in her orphanage and Skye learned how to steal the keys from the nuns so that she could sneak in at night. Everything she learned about being a hacker –and everything she learned about her past– started in that room, those nights. By the time she was fifteen Skye had no real friends in what the nuns called "the real world" but she stayed up all night to chat with the like-minded in Singapore, Dortmund, Sydney. When she realized chances were none of the foster families would wanted her around for longer than a few months the only thing Skye hoped for was a home with a speedy connection. By the time she left the orphanage she had decided that was the kind of life to lead. It had messed up with her sleeping patterns forever, though.

She hides it well but at first Skye has trouble adjusting to SHIELD's hours. Waking up always at the same time, and so early, dragging herself to the kitchen area to breakfast with the rest of the team – at first it's a bit of a struggle. That's the thing about having been on her own since she was sixteen, she is used to keeping the hours she wants, she never had to take other people into account when she made her plans. There have been a myriad of part-time jobs, freelance work, hand-to-mouth days and semi-legal ways of getting by but never the weight of constant responsibility.

Mornings are not even the hardest part; these people go to bed insanely early. Ward marchs them on to their bunks like the Boy Scout monitor he surely has been at some point in his life. Not Coulson and May, obviously, and Skye suspects the grown ups get to stay up past bedtime. Nights have always been when she works better, is more focused. Those first few days on the plane she wants to protest – but there's the part where she is kind of a spy in this house, and spies don't protest.

It's been a while since she's lived surrounded by people. All her childhood and teens Skye was sharing a room with between one and five other girls. Sharing a whole plane with just as many people should be easy. The first couple of nights she finds the little noises Fitz makes going about in the next room distracting. Okay, annoying. She shouldn't – she is used to parking her van in not-quite-great neighbourhoods (the only places they'd allowed her to do so) and spending half the night being risen from sleep by alarmingly strange sounds in the street outside. She's learned to differenciate between the General Weirdness of People noises and Danger Get The Keys And Get Out Of Here noises. That's why she always tried to avoid parking on remote or desolate places, so that if something happened to her she could ask around for help. The nice bit about living with the team is that you have other people to help out if a drunk tries to rob you. Also there are no drunks around trying to rob you.

She likes night flying, though. That part is really nice, with the smooth hissing of the engine while the whole place is in darkness, the plane humming under her feet when the rest of the team is asleep. The silence is never really silence, the darkness is never total darkness, and you are not exactly alone. It's much better than when they have to spend the night in an airport hangar – too static, and slightly claustrophobic.

At first when she can't sleep Skye stays in her bunk, reading, working, trying to figure out how it is that she's ended up here, in a SHIELD-owned airplane with all the luxuries. She does a lot of thinking on her bed those first nights. Then, little by little, she gets the courage (and the familiarity, this is her _home_ already, more than anywhere she's found before) to explore the plane at night.

Sometimes she crosses paths with May – the agent coming out of the cockpit or towards it, deciding autopilot is not good enough or simply enjoying the night flying from a position of advantage. At first Skye is terrified to meet her but though they very seldom exchange a word those moments of recognition between them become more and more companiable. It feels like an accomplishment to Skye, whenever the other woman nods at her, and it could be three in the morning, and the corner of her mouth is slightly turned up, there's more than just the acknowledge of Skye's presence, there's the implicit suggestion that Skye belongs here. This might be Coulson's team and his plane but it's Agent May's ride and Skye feels a bit more at home after this happens a couple of times, May _allowing_ her this little late hour freedoms. She never goes to the lab, because likewise that's FitzSimmons' domain, even when empty; she wouldn't dare disturb the place. But other than that Skye is happy to climb stairs and explore corridors without a sound (she's good at that, courtesy of years of sneaking out under the nuns' noses).

She is doing just that, pacing up and down the common areas like the plane belongs to her (or the other way around) when she sees Coulson sitting on the big couch, in the half darkness of the small table light, reading some file. Skye pauses in mid-step, convinced that if she can retreat now Coulson wouldn't see her, if she moves very, very slowly and carefully, like she's in _Jurassic Park_. But hey, she might be orphanage stealthy and all but Coulson is a Level 8 agent with more than twenty years of experience in the field. Of course he sees her.

Skye imagines he is about to give her one of his epically raised eyebrows, because little agents-in-training should be in bed or something like that. She is about to apologize for intruding, or taking liberties with his plane so late at night. But Coulson doesn't raise an eyebrow. He doesn't look at her sternly or like he's mad at her (she knows how that look goes, Skye shudders to remember) or she's overstepped some boundary. In fact Coulson nods in her direction, signaling it's okay for her to come closer. She does; tentatively at first and then with some enthusiam the last couple of steps because hanging out with the boss in the middle of the night? that's cool.

"Can't sleep?" he asks her. His voice is not his usually authoritative tone, so Skye is not concerned he might request a full medical check-up if she says she can't sleep. It just sounds like a friendly question.

She gets an idea. She holds out her arm towards Coulson, making a pained face.

"You should remove my bracelet –because it's too uncomfortable to sleep."

"No, it's not."

She lets herself fall on the couch by his side with a sigh. "I had to try."

He slants a smile in her direction.

The whole electronic monitoring bracelet situation is a bit absurd, if you ask her. It's obvious Coulson has more or less forgiven her. It's obvious he _trusts_ her again. If she thinks about it the warning he gave her about someday having to trust her with a secret implies he is planning on relying on her more and more in the forseeable future. There is no good reason for her to keep wearing the bracelet, no good reason other than Coulson being stubborn, or maybe it's a matter of timing.

She figures he's waiting for a sign, some grand gesture or a solemn moment where him taking off the bracelet _means_ something. Skye knows that her loyalty to this team, to Coulson, what it feels like, is real. But it's only fair he needs more concrete proof.

Things are not 100% peachy between them yet but after the visit to the Hub and what Coulson had found out about her past Skye is confident they are on the road to repairing the damage her lies had caused. And hopefully on the road to a bracelet-less future for Skye. She knows it was her hacking of the Level 8 panel what brought the team to Fitz's and Ward's rescue, and though Coulson hasn't publicly admitted she saved their asses the change in his behaviour tells Skye that he agrees the call she made, despite her methods, was the right one.

The fact that they can sit next to each other here, at 1.53 in the morning, and he seems okay about the company, is proof he is no longer angry.

"What's that?" she gestures towards the papers Coulson is studying.

He closes the black folder quickly, puts it away, out of reach. "Nothing. Old files."

"Can't sleep either?"

"Something like that," he says. Skye notices his voice is a bit off.

"I come here some nights. If I am awake the bunk feels a bit... restrictive. Hope that's okay with you."

 _It's your plane, after all_ , she thinks. She can't think of it as just a piece of SHIELD's property, that's wrong, it's Coulson's baby.

He nods. "I needed a change of scenery, as well."

"I didn't know it was this nice, flying by night. I thought it was going to be creepy after a while, or tiresome. But it's relaxing. I feel safe."

"I like it too," he says, throwing a fond look to his surroundings.

After this Skye finds Coulson like this regularly, sitting by himself on the couch or at the kitchen counter. He's not always pretending he's working on some document, and sometimes he doesn't even bother lying to Skye. One time she even finds him in Lola's driver seat, gazing somewhere Skye couln't reach. They don't ask each other why the sleepless nights, not really. It's something they accept and, at least as far as Skye is concerned, it's nice to have company.

 

 

 

 

 

**2**

"You should be sleeping," he says, instead of their customary _can't sleep?_ greeting. This time she finds him in the kitchen, drinking a beer by himself.

His expression is soft but darkened by the lingering worry. As if he feels she is going to disappear any moment now, her miraculous recovery a joke in bad taste. To be fair Skye also feels like that, exactly, as if she's been given a brief reprise, not a cure. But she's tired of people around her tiptoeing, tired of their concern, and her own.

She contemplates going back to her bunk just so that Coulson doesn't have to worry about insomnia being a symptom of her impending going-back-to-dead illness instead of their usual habit of meeting at this hour and talking the night away.

But she doesn't feel like being alone right now.

"I just spent three days sleeping, sir. I'm not in the mood for more of that right now."

She is also kind of afraid of going to sleep and not waking up again. Irrational, she knows, and she'll have to get over it soon, but the feeling is there, in her stomach and at the back of her throat. There's been enough darkness. Right now a night flight doesn't feel as comforting as it used to.

"Do you want me to call Simmons?" Coulson tries again. "She can give you something for it."

"No, I don't want drugs. Likewise, I've had enough of that stuff lately."

He goes to the fridge and gets her another beer.

"I thought you were going to recommend a big glass of warm milk for the sleeplessness," she teases.

"Warm milk? How old are you?" his mouth does that thing that means he finds something funny but he also finds smiling openly a bit uncool at the moment.

"Hey. Do you want to play cards?"

Coulson seems to think about it for a beat too long. His first instinct seems to be declining but he doesn't. "Let me get the deck."

She knows he's indulging her. He's been indulging these past couple of days. Because she almost died and because he thinks it's his fault. She wants to tell him that's dumb, but she knows he's not ready to hear it so she puts that off for a while. Truth be told, she likes that he's indulging her – that he goes out of his way to make her feel comfortable back in the Bus, to treat it like it was no big deal she got shot, to get her back to work and make her feel useful inmediately, the way he is smiling at her a lot for no reason, well, more than he usually does anyway.

And now he's agreed to play cards with her, which would normally take a lot of effort. Skye knows he is not really a stuck-up person, it's just that sometimes he acts like one.

Coulson deals the first hand.

At first they are all concentration, in silence. Playing is a good excuse not to talk, because there's a lot of scary stuff in Skye's head right now. He is good at this too. He's so used to wearing the professional non-expression that his face has no trouble hiding whatever cards he's been dealt. Skye welcomes the challenge. She knows the best trick would be keeping his attention somewhere else.

"Why don't you ever have breakfast with us?"

"What?" Coulson asks, distracted, as he rearranges the cards between his fingers.

"We usually have breakfast together. Even May comes by after tai chi. Sometimes, anyway. You've never had breakfast with us, not even once. You just emerge from your office all suited up and ready to kick some bad guy's ass. You always miss our morning ritual."

"I have a really good coffee machine in my office."

"I'm serious," Skye insists gently. "It's fun. Ward is surprisingly good at pancakes. It'd be nice to see you there sometimes."

"I'll take it into consideration."

Skye knows that's not very likely to happen but she had to try.

As for the game, the first hand ends quickly and catastrophically for Coulson.

"Ward warned me never to play card games with you." Skye can tell despite the light tone Coulson is none too happy to have lost.

"Ward's such a sore loser."

"I can see what he means though."

She snorts. "You just don't want to admit you suck at it."

Coulson looks at her like he wants to say something. Skye had seen him play before tonight, when the whole team was together for a game – he's a good at poker. She happens to be better. She has a great bullshit detector, she can always tell when someone is bluffing.

"What's up with you and Ward, anyway?" she asks. Ever since she has come back to work she has felt a tension between the two of them that wasn't there. It's not that she thinks it can affect the job, but she worries.

"Nothing," Coulson says flatly. It's a lie. Skye doesn't like it when he lies to her, is relieved when he backtracks. "It's... private. Don't worry."

"Okay."

Whatever is going on with Coulson and Ward she has the ugly feeling (more like the certainty) that it's somehow her fault, for getting hurt. But she's not going to go there if he doesn't want to talk. Instead she draws a four, which is exactly the card she needed.

"What do you know? I win again. Maybe I'm a 084 because I'm super-good at cards. Have you ever thought about it?"

" _Skye_."

"What? If I don't get to make jokes about my tragic origins then who does?"

Coulson looks unconvinced. There's a measure of comfort in how much he cares about Skye's emotional stability. The rest of the team is there for her, of course she knows, but it's not the same, they don't seem to notice the things Coulson notices – maybe it's a boss thing or a just-Coulson thing, she can't say, but instead of being overwhelming (he seems equally worried about pushing her too hard) Skye finds it refreshing.

"It's okay," she assures him, because hey, two-way street right here. "I'm pretty sure whoever thought I had powers was mistaken or something. It's obvious I'm not meant to be some kind of superhero."

"Mmm, I don't know," Coulson says, something almost teasing in his tone. "You have certain qualities..."

He'll have to do better than that if he wants to distract her from her game. She should know, she's been trying to do the same.

She replies, cheerful: "You don't have to be nice to me just because I got shot. Twice."

Something dark passes through Coulson's expression and she hopes she hasn't said the wrong thing. But then he relaxes into a smirk.

"Great. Because it's been exhausting pretending to be nice to you."

Skye brandishes her cards with a hand flourish. "Flush. Woo hoo."

Coulson examines the cards, grabbing Skye's wrist to hold up her hand.

"This is very frustrating."

"What? You thought I'd let you win because you're my boss?"

"It's SHIELD protocol, actually," he grins. It's very encouraging seeing him like this, even knowing that in part it's for her benefit – Skye has unpleasant flashbacks of waking up in a hospital bed to a serious and sad looking Coulson. She'd very much like a government mind-wipe to forget that, even though Fitz keeps insisting there's no such thing.

"Another one?"

Coulson has a decided expression, jaw set and all. "We are not leaving here until I win once."

Skye laughs. Yeah, _not likely_.

 

 

 

 

 

**3**

It becomes a bit of an habit.

It doesn't happen every night, but it happens often enough that there's the expectation of it. The wordless agreement between them that this is their thing.

It's not like they make plans about it, but if they happen to meet each other during the night the underlying idea is that they want to be around each other for a bit. It's not every night, though Skye knows Coulson has trouble sleeping _every night_ – she is not blind, she pretty much figured he's been having nightmares all this time, and the nights he doesn't come out of his room Skye knows those must be the really hard nights. A couple of times she has toyed with the idea of just going up to his room and knocking on the door. She never does though.

She much prefers the nights when they see each other – she doesn't have to worry about that other stuff.

And she sleeps better with the aftertaste of this their ritual; after they've said good night and gone their separate ways in the plane, Skye finds it easier to welcome the pleasantly cold bedsheets and the darkness in her bunk, after a couple of hours of conversation and dim lamplight. She is a bit less restless those nights – which can be said about Coulson's influence in general, she can read the symbology.

"Can't sleep?"

She shakes her head.

Coulson gestures for her to come sit.

Tonight she doesn't find him on the big couch, or in the kitchen. He's sitting by one of the little glass tables the plane has.

Tonight he has a glass of scotch, barely touched, by his side. That itself is not too rare, but Skye can read something unusual in the mood as she walks towards him. It's not a bad or alarming mood (she doesn't feel she might be intruding), it's just not what she was expecting.

She notices the file open on the table.

"What's that?"

"My file."

"Your file," she repeats softly as she sits down next to him.

"The file about my death – and recovery."

"– _death_."

"Mostly my recovery," he says. He shifts in his seat, turning to face Skye with his whole body. His voice is quiet and clear. "You've been looking for answers from SHIELD all your life, Skye. I also want some answers. About what happened to me, about _why_."

He hands her the file.

It's all there. The whole story – in excrutiating, clinical, SHIELDspeak detail. The parts Coulson never told her. Skye passes the pages with such careful fingers, as if she were holding a broken body in her hands. Whose broken body. She reads each word at least twice and Coulson waits, leaving her the space to do so, he rises his glass but never actually brings it to his mouth.

The pictures of Coulson... he was really dead. The images disturb Skye in more ways than she can comprehend. She's going to have nightmares about them forever. Correction, she's never sleeping again. She doesn't ever want to close her eyes and have those images of Coulson's lifeless body under her eyelids.

Coulson touches her elbow briefly, he thinks she's had enough of all that.

"Okay?" he asks her.

She swallows, nods. " _You_?"

He flashes a self-deprecating smile, as if he really has no other option but to be okay.

Skye realizes something.

"That's how you knew SHIELD could save me, when Quinn shot me."

"Not like me. You weren't dead yet," he says, wincing involuntarily at the words. "But yes, that's how I knew."

"Why would they do that to you? I mean, don't take this the wrong way. I'm glad you're alive, there is no bigger fan of you being alive than me. But – but why would somebody do this to another human being?"

"They say everything is on this file. That this is the truth of what happened, but I know it's not all. They did something else to me, I can feel it. How can I trust anything they say, after they lied to me for so long?"

Skye leans into him, altered.

"You can't! You can't trust them. If this is how you feel, you have to find out the truth. This is obviously important to you."

Coulson offers her a small, warm smile.

"I could use some help. Will you consider it?"

 _How can he even ask that?_ she thinks.

"How can you even ask that? Of course I'll help you."

"Thank you."

She glances back the file with apprehension. She'd do anything to help Coulson, of course. She just hopes it won't involve having to look at those pictures ever ever again.

That night she doesn't get much sleep.

 

 

 

 

 

**4**

She can no longer pretend she's not happy at the prospect of finding Coulson on the common places at night. She can't pretend it's not a factor in her wandering. She doesn't have much trouble sleeping these days – which is the main reason why tonight something like this happens.

"Can't sleep?" she is the one opening with the line tonight.

It always goes like this: Coulson makes a hand gesture and slides to one side of the couch, invinting him to join her. He's watching tv, and that's a bit less usual.

"I know we have a important meeting tomorrow. I can go to my bunk and pretend to sleep if that makes you think I'm more professional."

He shakes his head and Skye fits easily into the space beside him. She watches him struggle with the remote control for a while.

"I've been switiching channels for two hours."

"Nothing good on? Not even with SHIELD's generous cable suscription?"

"Seriously. So many channels and..."

The frowning lines of his face make her chuckle. "That's how old people speak. You know? That's literally the uncoolest thing I've ever heard you say."

"I'm sorry to disappoint you."

She grins, taking the remote control from his hands. " _Never_."

They find something mildly appealing to watch. A documentary about Eisenhower, one of those where they do reconstructions with semi-famous actors.

It's not that it's not interesting, and Skye likes learning about Eisenhower as much as the next person (high school drop out syndrome; Skye actually likes learning stuff, as a rule) but she is just tired.

They've only been watching the thing for about twenty minutes when Skye nods off. There isn't even a warning, some prelude to sleepiness Skye can fight. She just drops asleep. This has never happened before; the whole point of being out here with Coulson is that they can't sleep, right?

Skye doesn't know how long she sleeps. The reality outside her blurs into her dreamless slumber until she doesn't know if the noise she hears is the tv on or it's just the sleeping pattern inside her head. Whatever it is it's nice like a lullaby, or what Skye imagines that would be like, if lullabies were sung by stern documentary narrators. And then there's the warmth, which is what lures her to sleep and what eventually wakes her up.

When she wakes she wakes by degrees and then all of the sudden. There's something warm under her cheek and her chin. The feeling of fabric against her skin, rich fabric. Above all there's the smell, deep and strong but not unpleasant. A familiar scent, Skye realizes even in her unconscious state, one she's used to being around all day but which she has never been so close to, felt so sharply. It's the smell what finally brings her about.

She wants to say _hey, what?_ because hey, what? but her mouth is too pasty to form the words.

It takes her long – _way too long_ , if you ask her– to realize she has fallen asleep on Coulson's shoulder.

She's alarmed that it feels so good and so _safe_ to just stay there that it takes her an extra second or two to extricate herself from that position. Not that she entirely does it – extricate herself. She just lifts her head so that it isn't comfortably set under Coulson's jaw and she manages a bit of space between them, but she keeps half her body pressed against his arm.

He is looking down at her, curious but neutral.

"Oh shit. Sorry. I didn't drool on you. Did I?"

"Just a bit."

He smiles. It does nothing to convince her that she should move away, that smile, so she unconsciously leans into him, her body content to keep to all that warmth and niceness. She tries to wipe the trails of drool from her chin with the back of her hand and as much dignity as she can muster.

He watches her, his expression unreadable.

"Do I have something on my face?"

"Here," he says and does something bizarre: he reaches his fingers to her cheek and brushes a strand off her face.

He's too careful and too bold at the same time. Skye smells that cologne of his on his wrist now that it's so close. It's so strange – having Coulson (or bits of him anyway; his fingertips, the curve of his neck, his face) so close to her. This is new, she thinks.

Her hair is no longer on her face but Coulson keeps his hand touching to her collarbone. Skye is still half asleep and the gesture is so unexpected that she wonders if she's hallucinating it. She stops wondering almost immediately because Coulson's mouth on hers is no hallucination.

The kiss is feather-light and careful, but it doesn't feel chaste at all. There's a lot of intent behind it, a lot of intent Skye had no idea Coulson possessed, not towards her. His fingertips dart to the place where her neck meets her shoulder. Have Coulson's hands always been so big? Skye is only noticing now.

"That's new," she says afterwards. A pretty freaking stupid thing to say, she knows.

Coulson frowns and the next couple of things happen very quickly: he moves away and suddenly the warmth Skye was pressed up against is painfully gone, Coulson is inexplicably up on his feet, straightening his clothes and adjusting his tie.

"Right. We'd better get some rest. Tomorrow's assignment won't leave any room for error."

He looks genuinely spooked. She's never seen him like that.

Skye freezes. She knows she should say something. Right this moment. Coulson hesitates about his next move, like waiting to see if she really is going to sit there like an idiot. She really _is_ going to sit there like an idiot.

In the end he walks out without even switching the tv screen off, leaving a very confused Skye staring directly at the face of Ike Eisenhower, not knowing what to feel about it.

 _Rest_ , Coulson said. Skye questions how much his actions tonight will do for her insomnia. She chose to fall asleep at the worst possible time, it seems – but now she is wide awake.

Her hair smells of him all night.

 

 

 

 

 

**5**

It's been days and of course she hasn't found Coulson in any of her usual nighttime wanders. She's tried. She didn't expect it, but was hoping – they have to clear the air. Perhaps he is being a lot more sensible – they need to keep some distance. Specially with work getting as serious as it's ever been since Skye left the hospital.

She's not _terribly_ worried at this point; if her relationship with Coulson survived Skye trying to hack SHIELD _from the inside_ she's confident it can survive a bit of inappropriate late-night intimacy. Coulson is not avoiding her on the job, which is good. But it also makes her feel a little foolish, makes her feel like she has fretting over nothing, made a big deal out of something irrelevant. His behavious (normal, much too normal) has Skye convinced it is indeed irrelevant and she shouldn't be a child about it.

They still have to say it out loud. _Irrelevant_. Or else.

Tonight, for different reasons than usual, Skye can't sleep. She sits up on her bunk, working at her laptop, waiting and also _not waiting_.

She leaves her door slightly ajar.

She has decided it's his call, after all. She is not about to go roaming through the plane hoping to bump in him, but they have to talk, and quickly – before it becomes A Problem. He has to come to her, though. She can't make him. She can't be the one agressive here.

There's a soft knock on her door around midnight.

"I figured you wouldn't be asleep," Coulson starts, opening her door in half, but staying on the outside.

"Come in."

Skye lets him sit on the bed and she closes the door. She can live without Fitz listening to this conversation – specially if the conversation goes anywhere near where she wants it to. The fact that Coulson is sitting on her bed –on her tiny, miniscule, not-made-for-two-people bed– does very little to alleviate the problem at hand. She can't help feeling she's doing something wrong just by having him here.

"Do we need to talk about the other night?" he asks, not wasting any time.

Okay, she will do him the courtesy of being just as direct.

"Do we need to talk about the fact that you kissed me and then freaked the hell out on me? I don't know. Do we?"

"That's not how I would categorize what happened?"

"And how would you _categorize_ it?"

He doesn't reply.

It occurs to Skye that he might have run away the other night because he believed the advance was unwelcome: her smashingly alluring _this is new_ , as reactions go, might have been particularly underwhelming to him. She would like to set him straight, tell him that of all the reasons to freak out about the incident a lack of interest on Skye's part is Definitely Not One of Them. She can't even imagine herself opening the door to that conversation so for now Coulson might have to remain mistaken.

"That doesn't matter," Skye tells him, leaving aside the matter of what exactly happened the other night. "What matters is that you can't be the way you've been these past couple of days. It's been subtle but I've noticed. You've been avoiding me."

"I haven't."

"Yes. You have."

"Yes I have."

Skye has to chuckle; he does that a lot, and she always finds it funny. Her whole body relaxes after that. Coulson's too. Suddenly it's not so weird having her boss sitting on her bed – _it is_ , but not the wrong kind of weird.

Before he walked in the room Skye had been thinking about downplaying the whole thing, perhaps even to herself: telling Coulson something like this was bound to happen, because they were so close, there was this familiarity, and people sometimes confuse it for something else, but it didn't really mean anything. Skye had been set on telling him he shouldn't worry.

 _Irrelevant_.

She's changed her mind: she doesn't want to say all that crap anymore.

She pulls her legs up, hugging her knees.

"Look, I have no idea what's on your mind but me, I don't want to pretend that whatever that was the other night is not there. Don't make me pretend that."

"No. I don't want that."

She is very aware of how close they are. She can smell him – an involuntary flashback of the other night, the feeling of heavy sleepiness and comfort and his body, the unusual sense of safety. There's something else here, not just the comfort and familiarity. Something Skye can't put her finger on but she's intrigued enough to follow that feeling down, her body imperceptibly leaning into the body next to her.

Coulson can more or less sense this new tension in her posture.

He points out: "There are rules about this."

"You already know what I think about rules," she says, almost defiantly, with just the right amount of playful. "What are you thinking?"

Coulson sighs, but it's not real, because there it is, that smirk of his.

"I'm thinking you are a bad influence," he says. Then, quietly: "And let's leave it at that."

"Leave it?"

" _For now_."

She nods.

"I get it. We have our mission. I still have to figure out what I am, why all those people died when I was a baby. And we still have to discover if SHIELD is hiding something more from you."

"Thank you."

"But afterwards."

He raises an eyebrow. "Afterwards..."

"I'm going to want to revisit this conversation," she warns him.

"I know you do," his voice full of badly-hidden fondness. "This conversation will be revisited. You can be sure of that."

"Great. Thanks. Meanwhile, let's not be too weird. Like, please don't avoid me. I can't stand that."

"I won't. You have my word." He brushes his hand across the underside of her arm, as proof of his commitment.

Neither say anything else and for a moment it feels like Coulson is going to stay there, sitting on her bed, shoulder touching hers, for the rest of the night. Skye can't see a single flaw in that plan.

Then he stands up. It's a bit too deja-vu, except he doesn't look frightened anymore.

"I should let you rest," he says, very calm and collected, even though she's pretty sure that line is code for _if I stay any longer we're gonna get in trouble_. She gets that, so she doesn't try to stop him.

This time he gives her a little questioning glance before leaving, asking for permission. Mercifully for both of them Skye agrees, and watches him go without the apprehension of the other night.

When she finally lies down on the bunk the covers are still a bit warm from having him sit on it. Skye sleeps surprisingly well that night.

 

 

 

 

 

**6**

Skye can't help the smuggest smile in the world the next morning when Coulson walks, nonchalant as everything, into the kitchen area and takes a seat at their breakfast table, moving like he does this every single day.

"Oh My God who's dying?" Fitz asks, unable to process it.

May arches an eyebrow, which is pretty much her equivalent to Fitz's freak out. Simmons looks delighted because she's Simmons and hurries to offer a choice or coffee or tea. Skye finds amusing how Coulson is very deliberatedly avoiding her eyes – but not in a bad way, more like he's a bit contraried that he's following Skye's advice and he doesn't want admit she was right about this by glancing her way.

Everybody circles around Coulson, expectant.

"I heard a rumor Agent Ward was a pancake specialist," his casual explanation.

There's a beat in which nobody moves or says anything and Skye holds her breath, until Ward's whole body mass relaxes. Coulson is then rewarded with two golden, perfectly formed pancakes and a rare Ward-smile. Three quarters of one, anyway.

 _What the hell is going on?_ Fitz hisses and Simmons shushes him. May does something that could very well be interpreted as beaming as she looks at Ward serve a second helping to everyone. Well, if today they don't deserve an extra helping of food, when do they? Skye, mouthful of delicious carbohydrates, looks around her wondering _how is this my life now?_

And to be fair to Coulson he is graceful enough to give credit where credit is due: somewhere between pancake bites and coffee sips, he throws a little glance at Skye that goes unnoticed by everyone else, a little glance that says something a lot like _okay, so you were right_.

Skye thinks, _Get used to it, A.C._


End file.
